Re: Minutes: Foreign OSes BoF

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

13 mar 2008 kl. 10.13 skrev Alberto Ruiz:

Hi Alberto,

Thanks for sharing the results of the BoF!

Looks like you had a good discussion.

Cheers,
  Micke

> Hi,
> this is some sort of summary of the issues discussed in the foreign  
> OSes BoF at the hackfest.
>
> Attendees:
> tml, jdahlin, rhult, kris, bratsche and myself were there.
>
> The discussion was focussed on Win32 and OSX, and we identified the  
> main challenges there.
>
> The problems:
> * We tried to identify the reason because people are choosing  
> wxWidgets or Qt over Gtk+, it's not a technical issue rather than a  
> marketing one. People feel like wxWidgets is better because they use  
> native widgets, improving the engine and the dialog look and feel  
> would help there.
> * It's really hard for application developers to figure out how to  
> create and deploy an application out of the linux environment. We  
> should provide better developer tools.
> * Regarding the previous point, we should provide better installers  
> of the Gtk+ runtime that can be reused from their development  
> environment so people don't have to rebuild Gtk+ themselves and  
> distribute a custom version.
>
> The status:
> * Backends: rhult keeps working hard to get the Mac OSX one into  
> shape, it seems that we're not far to get there. bratsche and tml  
> are rocking on the win32 front, it's been working for a while now,  
> and besides some glitches, it's in an acceptable state at this point.
>
> * Engines: both needs some love, the win32 one is almost into an  
> acceptable shape, whereas  the Mac OS X one still nees some love,  
> although it's getting along pretty well.
>
> *Development tools: kris got XCode integration working, it would be  
> nice to automate the generation of the XCode template installer and  
> kind of make it a mainstream process. As for Visual Studio, bratsche  
> and I am going to start getting into Visual Studio to see if we can  
> come up with something similar.
>
> *Packaging: On OSX seems to be pretty much there for Gtk+  
> installation, not a big deal anyway. On the Win32 front we are close  
> to have a componentized .msi installer.
>
> The plans:
> We splitted the target audience for this effort into two: Gtk+  
> Application developers, and Gtk+ developers. We're going to focus  
> first in the first ones. And hold the discussion about people  
> wanting to hack on gtk+ using the development environments on osx  
> and win32.
>
> First step: Let's have a clear and only answer for people willing to  
> create and distribute/deploy applications on those platforms.
>
> We got to the conclusion that we should encourage apps to  
> redistribute gtk+ bundled with their apps, but make sure that they  
> don't build it themselves, so we don't have dozens of incompatible  
> binaries out there.
>
> For win32 we want to research if we could reduce the complexity of  
> the runtime by trying to come up with a single .dll and bundle  
> the .mo catalog files so we end up with less unix hierarchy involved  
> in the runtime. This is not a problem at all on OSX though.
>
> We're going to try to push this as a consistent effort between the  
> win32 and osx gangs. Once we have most of the goals there, we will  
> be able to start to send the message that Gtk+ is getting real  
> native :)
>
> That's pretty much it, If someone from the BoF feels like I missed  
> something please add your comments.
>
> Cheers,
> Alberto Ruiz _______________________________________________
> gtk-devel-list mailing list
> gtk-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list

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